Improve Every day

Day 316 – Musical Memorization

July 25th, 2017 – During my trip through South Dakota I was able to catch up on reading Deep Work by Cal Newport. In the book, Cal talks about professional Mental Athlete, Daniel Kilov, who specializes in memorization. Daniel has been able to master this ability so well that if you give him a randomly shuffled deck of playing cards, he can memorize the order of them in less than 5 minutes.

Cal talks about how Daniel was not very good student before he started his journey as a Mental Athlete. However, since he started to train to increase his memorization he ended up increasing his cognitive abilities and was able to concentrate more. He didn’t really change any study habits, yet his heightened focus allowed him to do much better in school.

After reading this chapter I was inspired to improve my cognitive abilities as well. Although, instead of memorizing a deck of cards I am going to take from one of Cal’s suggestions and do another activity that will yield the same effect. For me, this is taking at least 30-45 minutes a day practicing either Guitar or Piano(Switch it up depending on the day).

I use to practice both these instruments often during my younger years but had prioritize them less when I got further into my College studies. Have to say, it felt pretty dang relaxing taking up Piano again.